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Rage on the Right: Part II

Tea Party folks and others have a legitimate fear of the 21st century.

This is the second of a 3 point explanation of Rage on the Right you won't get from any other source.

Two. Legitimate fear.

One hundred years ago, a Pennsylvania farmers group urged its members to shoot at cars. I used to think that was funny, so did all my audiences. Now with right wingers threatening violence, I understand more the fear they have.

It is a legitimate fear. The auto destroyed a whole way of living. Today the web is destroying a whole way of living. There's nothing they (or anyone) can do about it, but it is a legitimate fear.

Photo: Front cover of Harper's Magazine from 100 years ago. The title, "The Invader," aptly sums up the legitimate fear farmers had of the auto.

Comments

Legitimate fear? I've thought about that concept for three days... If the farmers who shot at cars had legitimate fear, it stemmed from some fear of an inability to adapt. The "Change-is-Bad" crowd has a comfort zone with thick walls.

I've had first-hand experience with this. I've suggested, due to congestion and energy problems, that we should look at public transit options, including light rail (this is in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, about 75 miles west of Washington, DC). This included a 17-page cost study that looked at highway construction and maintenance costs. My political misrepresentatives accused me of trying to take peoples' cars away and bring back the horse and buggy. I was even called a Communist--no kiddng!

In fact, the generational break was noticable to me almost 20 years ago, when this was being disputed. Talking with people about my transit proposal revealed that the people who like the idea then were under 40 or over 70, while almost all the naysayers were between 40 and 70. Since then, everyone has gotten older; the lower break point now seem to be about 55-57, and I assume the high-end has moved up, too. I've also noticed the crowd on the commuter trains we have has gotten younger, too, and I feel like an old geezer when I'm on the DC Metro.

Briefly, the old crowd remembers what we had and misses it, the young crowd takes cars for granted and has other things to do (like work with computers during the commute, as you've noted), while the "difficult, in-between age" group sees its vision of the future going away, and doesn't like it at all.

I will partially disaggree with you. The Internet is a part of this as you suggest, but I think the bigger picture is that this country overall went from being the newest, the best, the most inovative, the most prosperous, and so on to the current wreck it seems to be becoming now. This includes everything from failing infrastructure to computer confusion (your Internet) to outsourced jobs to political and economic scandal to deficits to gas prices to a black president to terrorists to economic depression and, well, you get the picture.

Alternately, think of what the future looked like, say, in 1960, particularly the thought of the unlimited potential of technology, including, say, self-driving cars. Compare that to the present we now inhabit (which would have been the future of 1960), and consider what the future seems to look like now.

Perhaps the simplest way to put it is that the future isn't what it used to be.